Warriors: Extraordinary Tales from the Battlefield. Max Hastings
gasped in horror that evening when first she caught sight of her husband. He assured her that of her tragic prophecy the previous night, only the lesser half had been fulfilled.
Juana courted danger with the lightest of hearts. Once when the French staged a local attack, the Light Division was temporarily hustled into retreat. Smith had to muster with his brigade while his wife struggled into a habit and rode for her life, a few minutes ahead of the enemy. Vitty the pug was left behind with the baggage, but a bugler of the 52nd had the presence of mind to whip the little dog into a haversack and carry him off, as French fire crackled around the retreating regiment. For some hours the enemy held possession of the brigade baggage train. When the British regained the position, the Smiths were crestfallen to discover that a goose which they were fattening for Christmas dinner had vanished.
It is hard to imagine how Juana, a gently-reared, convent-educated young Spanish woman, adapted to a life among foreigners whose language she could not speak, and whose customs were wholly alien to her. She was deprived of female society, of a home and any vestige of comfort. Instead, she lived amid an army in which the highest chivalry co-existed with the basest cruelty. She was indefatigable in visiting the sick and wounded, sometimes riding Tiny across empty country in the army’s rear, scoured by French dragoons, to reach the hospitals. One night in France the couple were billeted upon an elderly widow who served them with bouillon in a Sevres bowl which Juana admired. Their hostess remarked that it was one of her wedding presents, never used since her husband’s death. Two mornings later on the road to Toulouse, the Smiths were appalled to see their servant enter, carrying the very same bowl full of milk. Juana, surely mindful of the pillage of her own home in Badajoz, burst into tears. Harry’s man shrugged off his master’s reproaches: ‘Lord, sir, why the French soldiers would have carried off the widow an’ she had been young, and I thought the bowl would be so nice for the goats’ milk in the morning.’ That night, when Harry returned to the cottage in which they were staying, there was no sign of his wife. At last she entered, weary and mudstained. She had ridden thirty miles back to Mont de Marsan to return the widow’s bowl. Reader, remember: she was barely sixteen.
‘When I was first troubled with you,’ Harry wrote to Juana some years later, ‘you were a little, wiry, violent, ill-tempered, always faithful little devil, and kept your word to a degree which, at your age, and for your sex, was as remarkable as meritorious, but, please Almighty God, I shall have this old woman with me, until we both dwindle to our mother earth, and when the awful time comes, grant we go together at the same moment.’ It is not hard to perceive the springs of Harry’s devotion.
The Smiths were with the British army at Toulouse in March 1814 when word came of Bonaparte’s abdication. Harry’s old battalion of the Rifles, which had sailed from England in 1808 numbering 1,050 officers and men, had in the meantime received only one draft of a hundred men, and now returned home just five hundred strong. Those five hundred were recognised, however, as the greatest skirmishing unit in the world. Johnny Kincaid observed wryly that the Rifles sailing from France looked a ‘well-shot corps…Beckwith with a cork leg – Pemberton and Manners with a shot each in the knees, making them as stiff as the other’s tree one – Loftus Gray with a gash in the lip and minus a portion of one heel which made him march to the tune of dot and go one – Smith with a shot in the ankle – Eeles minus a thumb – Johnston, in addition to other shot-holes, a stiff elbow, which deprived him of the power of disturbing his friends as scratcher of Scotch reels upon the violin – Percival with a shot through his lungs – Hope with a grapeshot lacerated leg – and George Simmonds with his riddled body held together by a pair of stays, for his was no holiday waist.’ Smith’s survival with so small a loss of his own blood was an extraordinary accident.
The captain was now presented with a painful dilemma, however. His brigade was given immediate orders to sail for America, where the British were committed to a new war. No leave was being granted. He himself might choose to resign his post and go home. But, for all his reputation as one of the boldest and brightest spirits in Wellington’s army, he still craved and needed promotion. Amid grief and many tears, he agreed with Juana that they should part. She was to go to London with Harry’s brother Tom and all the money the couple could muster, lodge in the capital and learn English while he campaigned. She flatly refused to approach his family in Cambridgeshire until he himself could escort her there. ‘Many a year has gone by,’ he wrote in his autobiography about the day of their separation, ‘still the recollection of that afternoon is as fresh in my memory as it was painful at the moment – oh, how painful!…I never was unmanned until now, and I leaped on my horse by that impulse which guides the soldier to do his duty.’ Heaven knows what would have befallen Juana if her husband had not returned.
Smith was appalled by the incompetence of the American expedition – a British attempt to escalate on land a struggle with the former colonists that had begun as the naval war of 1812 – and by General Robert Ross’s handling of his small army at Bladensburg, outside Washington, on 24 August 1814. The brigade-major described the burning of the American capital as ‘barbarous’, though he and his comrades ate eagerly enough the supper which they discovered on the White House table. As the British force withdrew towards the fleet, the soldiers riddled with dysentery, Ross deputed Smith to proceed to London with his despatch, reporting victory of a kind at Washington, together with an exposition of the acute difficulties of proceeding further. Little more than three weeks later, the Rifleman was in England. After seven years’ absence from his own country, he revelled in the spectacle of southern England in glorious summer sunshine; and even more, of course, in his reunion with Juana. He delivered his despatch to the prime minister’s residence in Downing Street, then hastened to his wife. From the window of the house where she was lodging she glimpsed his hand on the coach door as he peered forth in search of the right number, and shrieked: ‘Oh Dios, la mano de mi Enrique!’ He wrote later: ‘Oh! you who enter into holy wedlock for the sake of connexions – tame, cool, amiable, good, I admit – you cannot feel what we did!’ After the joy of their encounter, he was summoned back first to meet the prime minister the Earl of Liverpool, and then to an audience with the Prince Regent. Here was heady stuff for a twenty-seven-year-old soldier without experience of high places. Now at last, he was granted his majority.
Juana for the first time met her father-in-law, who travelled to London for the encounter. Old Mr Smith burst into tears of ‘joy, admiration, astonishment and delight’ at the spectacle of this passionate young woman in full Spanish costume. She immediately threw herself into his arms. The happy family journeyed together to Whittlesey, where there was a great reunion with Vitty the Pug, with Harry’s old hunter Jack, and finally with Tiny the Andalusian, whom the Smith grooms had found hard to manage. Juana, of course, had no such difficulty. ‘Don’t make a noise,’ she said, ‘and he will follow me like a dog.’ And so the horse did – into the family drawing room.
After just three weeks of domestic tranquillity, Major Smith was summoned again to Horse Guards. There was more news from America, all bad. General Ross had attempted to take Baltimore and failed, with the loss of his own life. Sir Edward Pakenham was to replace him, and Smith was appointed to become his assistant adjutant-general, a senior staff post. The commander-in-chief and his large staff set forth across the wintry Atlantic in November 1814, crowded into a frigate. They landed before New Orleans on 26 December, four days after the army had been put ashore. The subsequent battle, disastrous for British arms, cost Pakenham’s life. Its conduct shocked Smith. Since the débâcle in South America at the outset of his military career, he had never seen his countrymen so utterly confounded. In Spain, Wellington’s army set about its business with a confidence founded upon absolute faith in its leader, which was seldom misplaced. Now, in America, Smith once more stood witness to folly and mismanagement of the most grievous kind. There was only one Wellington. Many lesser British generals were utterly unworthy of their commands.
After the battle of New Orleans, Smith was sent to the enemy’s lines to arrange a truce for the burial of the dead. He found his American counterpart Colonel James Butler, the future president General Andrew Jackson’s adjutant-general, ‘a rough fellow’ who carried a drawn sword lacking a scabbard on his belt. Smith apologised for the delay in bringing forward the surgeons. Butler, gazing out upon the heaps of British dead and dying, said: ‘Why now, I calculate as your doctors are tired; they have plenty to